PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is the current darling of the shooter crowd, having sold more than seven million units in five months since its launch in Early Access. It was announced at E3 that developer Bluehole was bringing the game to Xbox One as a console exclusive, but apparently it needed a bit of help from Microsoft.

The company has announced a partnership with MS to help bring PUBG to Xbox One. "Microsoft is great, and they're a great partner to work with," said Brendan "PlayerUnknown" Greene during a Microsoft livestream from GamesCom 2017.

But that wasn't all the sunshine coming from the announcement.

 “Our goal is to deliver the best Battle Royale experience to a global audience and our partnership with Microsoft will allow us to do just that,” Bluehole Executive Producer and VP Chang Han Kim said in a GamesCom press release. “This partnership with Microsoft will accelerate the development and delivery of PUBG to console players around the world as we utilize their vast resources and impressive technical, sales and marketing expertise.”

“I couldn’t be more excited to be working with the team at Bluehole to bring Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds exclusively to our players on Xbox One this year,” Xbox chief Phil Spencer said in the traditional mutual backslapping response for the release. “We’ve been huge fans since the very earliest days, and worked hard to bring the game successfully to our E3 briefing. The announcement of our publishing the game on console today is an evolution of the strong partnership we’ve been building over many months.”

Despite all the glad-handing, the new partnership has not been able to put an official release date out there, other than "late 2017" for the Early preview version. Full release won't be until early 2018. Of course, if the PC version is any indication, Xbox One will be at least as popular and provide wads of cash for both Bluehole and MS whenever the game hits.